GoDaddy says outage was no hack

By Adam Martin

September 11, 2012

Monday's GoDaddy outage for which one person claimed credit was not a hack at all, GoDaddy said in a press release on Tuesday, just a breakdown of the domain registrar's servers. It's the first time GoDaddy has given any information at all about what happened, though the explanation is still fairly limited: "We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables," the company wrote. But the outage was still a big attention-getter for whoever is tweeting under the handle @AnonymousOwn3r, even if he or she didn't have anything to do with it. That account took credit for the outage early on and became the focal point of just about everynews story on the outage,including ours, as reporters seized on it as the only explanation being offered for the domain hosting service's outage. Meanwhile, @AnonymousOwn3r gained about 6,000 new followers overnight. It's posted retweeted lots of salutary remarks, but hasn't said anything about GoDaddy's press release. The company apologized for the outage in its press release, writing, "at no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised."